Your potential clients love to know the outcome of your product, so why not show them. People find images that show the successful outcome of a given situation attractive. It helps them to visualise their own success.

A lot of images, especially ones you find online, tend to feel fake — staged. If you’re going for that emotional connection, you want to choose an image that feels real and human. That’s where authenticity and originality come into the picture (pun intended).

5. MATCH YOUR BRAND

If you were finally able to find an image that tells a story, shows emotion and feels real, it was all in vain if the image doesn’t resonate with your audience. You want an image to match your clients’ worldview.

E.g. sports:

If you’re serving an audience of mainly women, choosing an image related to sports might not deliver the results you’re looking for (my apologies for the obvious generalisation, but I chose this cliché example exactly because of that.)

Ok, with these 5 guiding principles you now know what to look for in an image. Let’s find some great images!

TOOLS TO HELP YOU FIND THE RIGHT IMAGE

You can easily find millions of photos online. Most people just type in some keywords in Google Images and pick an image they like and use it for their latest blog or their branding materials, but in many cases that’s illegal. You’re not allowed to just grab an image and use it for your own purposes. In a lot of situations you need to ask (or buy) permission from the owner of that image.

Ok, what can I do instead?

Great question!

That’s where stock photos come into the picture again.

There are a lot of stock photo sites that offer free to use images or images that you can buy from them. I’ll list a few of them a little further down.

First I’d like you to consider this: If you’re going for the free stock photo approach, let me point out that these images are used by a lot of people all over the world. Chances are the image you choose to use is also used by thousands of other people. When you buy your images the chances of other people also using that image drop significantly.

This lack of originality has caused the formation of a movement to go ‘unstock’ with your images. They’re advocating more authentic images and that real = better.

SAY NO TO FREE?

“Here’s one of the first rules of your visual content strategy: Don’t use stock images on your branded website. Stock photos are cheap and easy, hence tempting. Do not be tempted by cheap and easy.”

If you’re willing to pay for images and you have a budget, these stock photo sites are my go-to places when I’m looking for that perfect image — although it’s a lot harder to find images here that don’t have ‘stock photo’ written all over them, but if you take the time, you can definitely find some:

Of course you can also take another route. Hire a photographer (if your budget allows it) orpick up that camera yourself and start taking your own shots. When it comes to authenticity and original, you cannot get more real.